Dave Brubeck

Dave Brubeck was a pianist and composer whose distinctive mixture of experimentation and accessibility made him one of the most popular jazz musicians of the 1950s and ’60s.

He died on Dec. 5, 2012, in Norwalk, Conn. He would have turned 92 the next day. Mr. Brubeck died while on his way to a cardiology appointment, Russell Gloyd, his producer, conductor and manager for 36 years, said. Mr. Brubeck lived in Wilton, Conn.

In a long and successful career, Mr. Brubeck helped repopularize jazz at a time when younger listeners had been trained to the sonic dimensions of the three-minute pop single. The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s 1959 recording of “Take Five” was the first jazz single to sell a million copies.

Mr. Brubeck experimented with time signatures and polytonality and explored musical theater and the oratorio, baroque compositional devices and foreign modes. But he did not always please the critics, who often described his music as schematic, bombastic and — a word he particularly disliked — stolid. His very stubbornness and strangeness — the polytonality, the blockiness of his playing, the oppositional push-and-pull between his piano and Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone — makes the Brubeck quartet’s best work still sound original.

Outside of the group’s most famous originals, which had the charm and durability of pop songs (“Time Out,” “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” “It’s a Raggy Waltz”), some of its best work was in its overhauls of standards like “You Go to My Head,” “All the Things You Are” and “Pennies From Heaven.”

David Warren Brubeck was born on Dec. 6, 1920, in Concord, Calif., near San Francisco. Surrounded by farms, his family lived a bucolic life: his father, Pete, was a cattle buyer for a meat company, and his mother, Elizabeth, was a choir director at the nearby Presbyterian church. When Mr. Brubeck was 11, the family moved to Ione, Calif., where his father managed a 45,000-acre cattle ranch and owned his own 1,200 acres.

He went to the College of the Pacific, near Stockton, where he first studied to be a veterinarian but switched to music after a year. It was there that he learned about 20th-century culture and read about Freud, Marx and serial music; it was also there that he met Iola Whitlock, a fellow student, who became his wife in 1942.

Mr. Brubeck formed the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951 and was the first jazz musician to be featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1954. That same year he signed with Columbia Records.

He and his wife had five sons and a daughter. Four of his sons — Chris on trombone and electric bass, Dan on drums, Darius on keyboards and Matthew on cello — played with the London Symphony Orchestra in a birthday tribute to Mr. Brubeck in December 2000.

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December 7, 2012, Friday

A voluntary plan from British newspapers would give independence and greater authority to a press regulator; the Grammy award nominations are announced; Dave Brubeck dies at 92; and Nickelodeon remakes the "Peter Rabbit" books as an animated series.